Denied degree by Harvard, she later became APA head

4:42 AM,
Mar. 30, 2013

Mary Whiton Calkins became the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905.

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Mary Whiton Calkins, who was born on March 30, 1863, became the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905. She became the president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918 but never received the doctorate she earned.

In her 1930 autobiography, she recalled how the new discipline of psychology attracted her: "What I gained from the written page, and even more from tête-à-tête discussion was, it seems to me as I look back upon it, beyond all else, a vivid sense of the concreteness of psychology and of the immediate reality of 'finite individual minds' ...